Your healthcare practice may be attracting more website visitors than ever. But how many of those visitors are actually becoming patients?

Traffic is an important part of digital marketing, but getting someone to your website is only the beginning. Once prospective patients arrive, they need to quickly understand the services you provide, determine whether your practice fits their needs, trust your providers and know how to take the next step.

That is where website conversion comes in.

Conversion benchmarks can provide healthcare organizations with useful context for evaluating performance. However, there is no single conversion rate every medical practice should be trying to reach. Specialty, treatment, location, traffic source, patient intent and even the type of conversion being measured can significantly affect the numbers.

Instead of chasing one percentage, practices should focus on a more practical question: Is our website making it easy for the right prospective patients to take meaningful action?

What Counts as a Healthcare Website Conversion?

A conversion occurs when a website visitor completes an action that matters to your practice.

Depending on the organization, that might include:

  • Requesting an appointment
  • Calling the practice
  • Submitting a patient inquiry
  • Completing a contact form
  • Requesting information about a treatment
  • Clicking through to an online scheduling system
  • Registering for an event or class
  • Taking another measurable step toward becoming a patient

Not every conversion has the same value.

Someone downloading a general resource is showing a different level of intent from someone requesting an appointment. A click on a phone number does not necessarily mean a completed call, and a submitted inquiry does not necessarily become a scheduled patient.

That is why healthcare organizations need to decide which actions represent meaningful progress in the patient journey before evaluating their website’s performance.

What Do Healthcare Conversion Benchmarks Tell Us?

The latest Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report offers one useful point of comparison.

The report analyzed more than 464 million unique visitors, 57 million conversions and 41,000 landing pages, using conversion data collected between July 23, 2023 and July 23, 2024.

Within Unbounce’s Health and Wellness industry category, the median landing-page conversion rate was 5.1%.

That category is broader than medical practices alone. Unbounce breaks it into several subcategories, including:

  • Medical treatment: 5.3% median conversion rate
  • Wellness: 8.2%
  • Dental services: 4.3%

Those differences illustrate why healthcare organizations should be cautious about universal benchmarks. A dental practice should not necessarily compare itself with a wellness business, and even two medical practices may see very different results depending on specialty and patient intent.

There is another important distinction: these are landing-page conversion benchmarks, not benchmarks for an entire healthcare website.

Landing-Page Conversion and Website Conversion Are Not the Same

A landing page is generally built around one audience, message and action. Someone may click an ad for a specific treatment, arrive on a page devoted entirely to that treatment and see one prominent invitation to request an appointment.

A full healthcare website has a much broader purpose.

Patients may visit to research symptoms, learn about providers, check insurance information, find an office location, access a patient portal or read about a treatment before they are ready to schedule anything.

That is why applying a 5.1% Health and Wellness landing-page benchmark to an entire medical website can be misleading.

Horton Group discusses this distinction further in Landing Page vs. Website Page: When to Use Each for Maximum Conversions. Landing pages are generally designed around a focused conversion goal, while traditional website pages often need to educate, establish credibility and support several stages of the decision process.

Both can contribute to patient acquisition, but they should be measured in context.

Patient Intent Has a Major Impact on Conversion Rates

Consider two website visitors.

One searches for general information about a condition and reads an educational article on your website. The other searches for a specific treatment in their city and reaches a page explaining that treatment, the providers who perform it and how to request an appointment.

Those visitors have very different levels of intent.

The first may be at the beginning of a weeks- or months-long research process. The second could be ready to contact a provider today.

Traffic source matters, too.

Unbounce’s Health and Wellness data found that Google paid-search traffic had a 4.7% median landing-page conversion rate within its dataset. Email traffic converted at considerably higher rates than paid channels in the category, which makes sense when recipients may already have a relationship with or awareness of the organization.

Specialty, treatment, geography and urgency can introduce even more variation.

A conversion rate should therefore be evaluated in the context of who reached the page, why they arrived and what action the page asks them to take.

More Healthcare Website Traffic Does Not Automatically Mean More Patients

Increasing traffic can feel like progress, but traffic without conversion may simply mean more people are encountering the same website problems.

Suppose a healthcare website increases monthly traffic from 10,000 to 15,000 visits but patient inquiries remain flat. The practice is reaching more people without creating more opportunities.

At that point, simply pursuing another traffic increase may not solve the problem.

Instead, examine what happens after visitors arrive.

Can they understand your services? Can they find the right provider? Is the next step clear? Do they have enough information to feel comfortable making contact? Does the website work properly on their phone?

A successful healthcare website design needs to support the patient’s decision-making process, not simply attract visits.

Make Services and Treatments Easy to Understand

Healthcare decisions can already feel complicated. Your website should not add unnecessary confusion.

Visitors should be able to quickly determine what your practice treats, which services are available and what they should do next.

That means avoiding unnecessary jargon when plain language will do.

Unbounce’s data reinforces the importance of clarity. Within its Health and Wellness category, landing pages written at approximately a fifth- to seventh-grade reading level had a 10.8% median conversion rate. Conversion rates fell as reading difficulty increased.

That does not mean every healthcare page should be oversimplified or stripped of necessary clinical information. It means medical expertise should be communicated in language patients can understand.

Clear content helps prospective patients make informed decisions and makes it easier for them to determine whether your practice is relevant to their needs.

Build Trust Before Asking for an Appointment

Choosing a healthcare provider is different from buying an ordinary consumer product. Patients may be sharing sensitive information, making significant financial decisions or seeking help during a stressful time.

Trust matters.

A healthcare website can support that trust by providing useful information about physicians and other providers, including their credentials, specialties, experience and approach to care.

Patient reviews, testimonials where appropriate, professional affiliations, facility information and clear contact details can provide additional reassurance.

The website itself also communicates credibility. Outdated information, broken pages, inconsistent branding or a difficult user experience can introduce doubt before the patient ever contacts the practice.

Horton Group’s before-and-after website design examples demonstrate how a redesign can go beyond aesthetics by improving navigation, engagement and the pathways visitors use to contact a business.

Make the Next Step Obvious

A prospective patient should not have to search through several pages to figure out how to make an appointment.

Calls to action should be easy to identify and appropriate for the page.

Depending on the practice, those might include:

Request an Appointment. Schedule Online. Call Our Office. Find a Provider. Contact Us.

The exact wording matters less than clarity.

The pathway after the click matters, too. If “Request an Appointment” leads to a lengthy form requesting unnecessary information, the website may create friction at the exact moment someone is ready to convert.

Healthcare organizations should review the complete process from the patient’s perspective.

How many clicks does it take? How much information is required? Does the form work properly? What happens after submission? Is the patient told when to expect a response?

Reducing unnecessary steps can make the website easier to use without sacrificing the information your practice actually needs.

Mobile Usability Deserves Particular Attention

Mobile devices account for a significant share of healthcare landing-page traffic, making mobile usability an essential part of conversion optimization.

Unbounce’s Health and Wellness data provides a useful illustration. Mobile devices generated nearly seven times as much landing-page traffic as desktop devices within the category, yet desktop visitors converted 22% better.

That does not prove that poor mobile design caused the entire difference. Device behavior and intent can also influence conversion rates.

It does, however, reinforce the need to examine the mobile patient experience carefully.

Can patients easily tap the phone number? Can they read treatment information without zooming? Are forms practical to complete on a phone? Are buttons large enough to use comfortably? Does navigation make sense on a smaller screen?

Horton Group’s web design and development approach emphasizes mobile-first websites and user experience because a website has to function wherever patients encounter it.

Accessibility, Speed and Functionality Are Part of Conversion

Conversion optimization is not only about changing button text or moving a form higher on the page.

Basic website functionality can have a major impact on whether a patient completes an action.

Slow-loading pages create friction. Broken forms can eliminate conversions entirely. Poor navigation can prevent visitors from finding information. Accessibility barriers can make a website difficult or impossible for some people to use.

Healthcare organizations should routinely test their most important patient pathways.

Submit the forms. Click the phone numbers. Test appointment links. Navigate the website using different screen sizes. Review key pages for accessibility issues.

The goal is to remove unnecessary obstacles between patient interest and patient action.

Match the Landing Page With the Patient’s Search

If your practice is investing in paid search, message alignment becomes especially important.

Someone clicking an advertisement for a specific treatment should not land on a generic homepage and be expected to find the relevant information themselves.

The landing page should continue the conversation that began with the search or ad.

If the search is about a particular procedure, the page should clearly discuss that procedure. If the advertisement emphasizes a specific location, provider or service, visitors should see corresponding information after they click.

For paid-search campaigns, the landing page should closely match the patient’s search intent and the messaging in the ad.

Horton Group’s inbound marketing services similarly focus on attracting the right visitors and then using landing pages, calls to action and forms to move qualified users toward conversion.

Track More Than Form Submissions

You cannot improve healthcare website conversion if you cannot reliably measure it.

Practices should identify the actions that represent meaningful patient interest and make sure those actions are being tracked.

That may include form submissions, appointment requests, calls from the website, clicks into scheduling systems and other important interactions.

Call tracking can be particularly important. If a practice receives a significant portion of new-patient inquiries by phone but only measures website forms, its reported conversion performance may substantially understate the website’s contribution.

Measurement should ideally extend beyond the initial inquiry as well.

How many inquiries are legitimate prospective patients? How many become appointments? How many appointments are completed?

A campaign producing 100 low-quality inquiries may be less valuable than one producing 30 inquiries that consistently become appropriate new patients.

How to Diagnose Strong Traffic but Weak Patient Conversion

If website traffic is healthy but inquiries or appointment requests are disappointing, look at the entire patient experience before assuming the marketing channel is the problem.

Start with the traffic itself. Are visitors reaching the website for relevant treatments and services, or is your SEO or advertising attracting people who are unlikely to become patients?

Then examine the pages they reach.

Is the content relevant to their search? Is the service explained clearly? Are providers and credentials easy to find? Are calls to action obvious? Does the website establish enough trust to make someone comfortable contacting the practice?

Finally, test the conversion process itself.

A technically broken form, confusing scheduling system or poor mobile experience can suppress conversions even when everything earlier in the marketing funnel is working.

Conversion problems are rarely solved by staring at one percentage.

Test Improvements Instead of Relying on Assumptions

Once you identify a possible problem, test improvements and measure what happens.

That might mean changing the wording or placement of an appointment call to action, simplifying a form, improving treatment-page content, adding provider information or creating a more relevant landing page for an advertising campaign.

Make changes deliberately rather than redesigning everything at once.

If multiple elements change simultaneously, it becomes difficult to determine which improvement affected performance.

Horton Group has long emphasized web design practices focused on lead conversion, including intuitive navigation, accessible conversion paths, clear calls to action and content that supports the user’s decision.

The same principles are especially important when the conversion represents a prospective patient’s first interaction with a healthcare organization.

Is Your Healthcare Website Turning the Right Visitors Into Patients?

Unbounce’s 5.1% median conversion rate for Health and Wellness landing pages provides useful context, as do its more specific 5.3% medical treatment and 4.3% dental benchmarks.

But none of those percentages should become a universal target for your healthcare website.

They describe landing pages within Unbounce’s dataset from July 2023 through July 2024. They do not account for every medical specialty, market, traffic source, appointment process or patient journey.

Your practice needs its own definition of success.

Are prospective patients finding the right information? Do they understand their treatment options? Does the website establish trust? Can they easily contact the practice or request an appointment? And are those inquiries ultimately turning into the patients your organization is equipped to serve?

Those questions provide a much more meaningful measure of website performance.

Horton Group has more than 30 years of experience helping organizations build websites and digital strategies focused on attracting and converting the right audiences. Our professional services web design experience includes healthcare organizations, supported by web design and development, SEO and digital marketing services.

If your healthcare website is generating traffic but not enough meaningful patient action, contact Horton Group to discuss how design, content, usability and conversion tracking can work together more effectively.